Vicious (2025)
Premise: After inviting an old lady in at night (really bad idea), Dakota Fanning receives a very obviously cursed box and some instructions… to wit: there’s this hourglass, if the sand runs out she’ll DIE, to refill it she needs to sacrifice three things: something she hates, something she needs, something she wants.
This would have been a really short movie if only Ms Fanning was a reader of this, your favourite blog: she could have just printed a screenshot and told the box “here, all three, have fun!” and laff and laff at the evil thing. Unfortunately…
Under 90 minutes? No and really, it didn’t need to be that long
Do they say the title? NO!
First thing I thought of:
Okay, more: The cool thing about The Twilight Zone classic episodes is that everyone knows how they go. The problem when you try to film a movie in 202X with a very twilightzonesque premise is that uh everyone will guess how it will go, there will be zero surprises and it will be so predictable that it’ll end up feeling mediocre at best. Like, you could summarize the whole movie in three sentences, that is not enough for the almost two hours of runtime, unfortunately. Add to that some really really crappy jumpscares and uuugh. Dakota Fanning and the old lady (Kathryn Hunter, hagtastic as usual) do their best but the story itself is so cheesy and predictable that there’s little they can do about it.
A simple way to improve it: there are two, maybe three surprisingly graphic scenes in this movie, the rest is basically pg-13. I say, go hog wild, embrace your desires, get gory as hell and since we’re talking about boxes just bring up the cenobites already, geez.
Trivia about the IMDb trivia:
This movie was originally set to be released in theaters, but after its original release dates changed (From August 8 to February 28 to undated), the movie was switched over to a streaming movie.
Geez, this is depressing. On the other hand, hey, I think “undated” is a really black metal word and I hope I can use it often in the future. Every cloud has a silver lining.
